Event Details

Venue

Event Description

Trinity by Louisa Hall

Louisa Hall will read from and discuss her new novel, Trinity, at the Country Bookshelf on Tuesday, November 13 at 6:00 PM. Hall is the Western Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Montana State University.
In a set of narratives by seven fictional characters, crossing time and space, Trinity explores the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Trinity presents a complicated and elliptical biographical portrait of a contradictory character, who defended his Communist friends but later betrayed them, who became a spokesperson against the weapons he helped create, who lied about his love affairs. Blending science with literature and fiction with biography, Trinity asks searing questions about what it means to truly know someone, and about the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.
“Each of the anecdotes” from the seven characters, writes Vanity Fair, “functions as a compelling story in its own right, and only becomes more powerful when taken together as a complete narrative. With beautiful specificity and nuance, Hall interrogates such major issues as ethics in scientific discovery and breaching the chasm between public and private selves.” The Texas Observer writes that her structure “pays off beautifully — Hall paints a portrait of Oppenheimer through refraction, resulting in a novel that captures his life fully, but indirectly,” and calls Trinity“ a dizzying, kaleidoscopic marvel of a book, and a beautiful reflection on the impossibility of creating a truly accurate narrative of any person’s life.”
Hall is the author of the 2016 novel Speak, chosen for One-Book-One-Bozeman in 2017, which explores the rise of artificial intelligence and its impact on human communication, connectedness and understanding. National Public Radio’s book review said, “Speak is one of a kind, the type of novel that seemingly comes out of nowhere and hits like a thunderbolt. It’s not just one of the smartest books of the year, it’s one of the most beautiful ones, and it almost seems like an understatement to call it a masterpiece.” The New York Post described the book as “strange, beautiful and unputdownable.”

Event presented by:

Montana State University Department of English and The Country Bookshelf